Math/problem solving

I’ve been wanting to explore the Monte Carlo simulations in Excel and I finally cracked open some books on the topic. I’ve probably been playing around with some examples since June or July and have seen a few techniques. My understanding of a Monte Carlo simulation is that a scenario, a setup, a model is…

“I wish you could reverse engineer the answer.” When we do the forecasting, pricing or some kind of modeling, we move forward in spreadsheets by inputting the values for the variables and letting the formulas calculate the end results such as net income or gross margin. However, sometimes, we know what kind of end results…

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these types of problems, but I wanted to look at some data that resided in text files (.txt) and I had never tried to pull in data from text files into Excel. The itch I wanted to scratch was Zoom call attendance: was attendance declining and…

Our vendor did it again: the data format changed – basically, the columns shifted – so that my formulas did not pull in the right numbers or any numbers at all. None of the 60+ files worked. Fortunately I quickly spotted the issue (and some of the managers are getting comfortable with numbers and excel…

Revising a code is way different from creating a code from scratch. My company switched over to a new payroll vendor and the new vendor’s data file is almost – but not quite – the same as the old data layout, but it is that tiny little variance that broke the code. Most of the…